


let’s talk about love (yeah, I’m talking about you)

by c_onstellations



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Childhood Friends, Friends to Lovers, Graduation, M/M, Misunderstandings, Prom, student council president jeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:00:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23844859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/c_onstellations/pseuds/c_onstellations
Summary: “I’ve got a high school graduation bucket list,” Jeno smiles and leans back into his chair. “Would you care to help me with it, Hyuckie?”
Relationships: Lee Donghyuck | Haechan/Lee Jeno
Comments: 12
Kudos: 142
Collections: nono birthday bash





	let’s talk about love (yeah, I’m talking about you)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [boyeater](https://archiveofourown.org/users/boyeater/gifts).



> this one goes out to the loveliest mandu!  
> mandu work very hard, everyone say thank you mandu ♡

It’s Monday, and Donghyuck is acutely aware of how he’s currently teetering over the cusp of a big milestone, so near yet so far. Classes were over, and most of his major assessments were done and dusted. High school graduation in a week, and prom, two weeks later, and after that, he gets to look forward to being spat out of the big machine that is public schooling, and straight into the vicious grips of sweet, _sweet_ society. _Pseudo-adulthood_ , he calls it, having seen the way the hyungs from his external dance crew act, struggling every other day with deadlines and taxes and existential dread. It’s not enticing, but that’s where he’s headed, whether he likes it or not.

Also, the seat beside him is noticeably vacant. Lee Jeno is not here yet.

 _Ah, Lee Jeno._ His best friend of twelve (twelve!) years, his impulse control, his ride or die. Probable valedictorian (Jeno always says that his vice-president, Renjun, is going to beat him this year, but Donghyuck begs to differ) and beloved student council president. If this was a coming of age movie, Jeno would be the adored male lead. This dude rivalled the likes of _Troy Bolton_. Donghyuck can’t even get mad about _how harmful stereotypes can be_ and the _toxicity of two-dimensional characterisation_ because that was the essence of Lee Jeno. Responsible, helpful, well-liked by both the student body and administration.

Jeno always shows up to school bright and early. He’d sit quietly in the council room in the morning to prepare for the morning address without fail, all prim and proper with his blazer ironed and uniform shirt tucked neatly into his pants. When the council was swamped with schedules and Jeno was drowning in work, Donghyuck would wake up an entire hour or so earlier just to haul his perpetually sleep-deprived self to school just to spend time with him, and Donghyuck remembers watching him on some mornings, peering over the daily agenda in the semi-lit room with glasses perched on his nose.

Instagram tells Donghyuck that the student council handover ceremony was last Friday. There was a video on Chenle’s Instagram story highlights titled “STUDENT COUNCIL HANDOVER [CROWN EMOJI] [CROWN EMOJI] [CROWN EMOJI]” depicting Jeno fastening his own _President_ pin onto Chenle’s blazer, followed shortly by a slow pan of the celebratory Korean BBQ dinner that celebrated their respective starts and ends of term.

Sometimes, Jeno would reach over to swipe Donghyuck’s phone away from his hands, chiding him for spending far too much time on social media. In response, Donghyuck would simply scoff, and retort, “how else would I stay connected to the news?” Jeno uses the same comeback, every time. “The social life of every person is not news. Is it necessary to know that much?”

In an exciting twist of events, Jeno finally rolls into class, a full twenty minutes after Chenle’s morning address, immediately inciting a chatter among their peers as he does so.

Donghyuck nearly chokes on air at the sight of him at the door: windswept blonde hair, tie loosely knotted around his collared shirt.

Imaginary Jeno’s voice taunts him in his head: _Is it necessary to know that much?_

 _Yes_ , Donghyuck spits back with an unprecedented ferocity in his head. Fuck that social media weekend detox. Nobody told him that Jeno went blonde?

“You didn’t tell me you were going to do _that_ to your hair,” Donghyuck mutters through clenched teeth as Jeno slides into the seat next to his, “and why are you so late? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you run late. Like ever.”

Jeno shakes his head.

“Were you helping Chenle with his address?”

“I wanted to,” Jeno twirls a ballpoint pen between his fingers, “but nope. He’s doing fine.”

“Then why are you late?”

Jeno keeps his eyes trained on the whiteboard, unfazed. “Just felt like it.”

“What does that mean?”

“Donghyuck, is there something that you’d like to share with the class?” their teacher frowns.

Donghyuck shuts his mouth and ducks his head in what he hopes seems like an apologetic enough gesture, and spends the rest of class trying not to think about what Jeno just said.

The walk to the next class had been an interesting one, to say the least. Jeno’s new appearance takes the school by storm, garnering a whole lot of attention, with starstruck students stopping to do a double-take before they choose to simply gawk, wide-eyed and astonished. Whispers abound the hallway, _have you seen how good Jeno looks blonde?_ Renjun even shoots him a “congrats, you’ve finally done it!” coupled with a hi-five when he passes him by.

It’s mostly positive, until another teacher stops him, quite suddenly, seriously speaking about how blonde “wasn’t a very professional colour”. Jeno smiles and bows before he takes his leave. Donghyuck rolls his eyes so hard he thinks that he can see the inside of his brain.

_Huh_. Jeno was just behind him in the lunch line. All it took was for Donghyuck to turn around to collect his utensils and poof, somehow, he’s gone? He scans the cafeteria for traces of his best friend, before belatedly realising that he has to alter his mental image of Jeno; he’s not looking for dark hair anymore, he has to comb the sea of students for blonde now.

Jeno eventually arrives, several beats late at their usual lunch table.

“Where did you go? I turned around and you disappeared.” Donghyuck spares a moment to glance up at Jeno, before resuming picking out the bean sprouts from his tray.

“Um, someone asked me whether I wanted to go to prom with them,” Jeno replies casually, picking up the fried egg in his tray and moving it over to Donghyuck’s.

Donghyuck puts his chopsticks down at the sound of this. _Prom_. A quick recount of their friendship told him that any explicit agreement never materialised, but he’d always assumed that the both of them would go to prom _together_. Oh god. Donghyuck forgot to account for Jeno’s popularity and shit, now he has to go alone?

“But,” Jeno continues breezily, as if this wasn’t a big deal, as if Donghyuck is not already having a mini meltdown inside his head, “I had to turn them down because I have my own plans already.”

 _My own plans_. What does that mean? Donghyuck wonders if twelve years of growing up together had just gone up in smoke. With every passing minute of the day, he fears that he’s understanding less and less of the person he thought Lee Jeno was.

Jeno reaches midway across the table, ceremoniously dumping Donghyuck’s discarded serving of bean sprouts into his own tray. Donghyuck takes it upon himself to address the elephant in the room.

“So, your hair.”

“Ah, well.” Jeno runs his hair through his hair once, as if he too, was still in disbelief that his hair was no longer pitch black. “Noona helped me with it over the weekend.”

“Suddenly?”

“As a celebration of sorts. Now that I’ve stepped down and everything.” Jeno gestures for Donghyuck to come closer, and his voice drops a little lower. “The thing is, I’ve spent all my time here caught up with responsibilities right? When I look back on my high school experiences, I don’t think I’ve really _lived_ , you know?”

Jeno still has his blazer on, but the part of the fabric where his president pin had always been is noticeably empty. Donghyuck’s mind churns, puts two and two together. “Now that you’re absolved of all responsibility, you’re going to act up?”

Jeno nods, and it’s such a ridiculous situation, how enthusiastic someone can get about getting into trouble.

“You didn’t even get booked for being late this morning because everyone thought you were helping Chenle out.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’ve got a high school graduation bucket list,” Jeno smiles and leans back into his chair. “Would you care to help me with it, Hyuckie?”

Donghyuck spends his free period at the library, rushing his scholarship application when he feels a tap on his shoulder.

“Lee Jeno,” Donghyuck gasps in realisation as he catches sight of golden hair. “What are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be in Geography now?”

“What is Mr Jung going to do? Jeno pulls up a chair and plops himself opposite him. “Tell me more fun facts about the rainforest? I don’t think so.”

Donghyuck sends Jeno a look of disapproval. It’s funny how the tables have turned now; a year ago, it was Jeno who had to drag him by the ear to attend his history class, and now, it was _his_ turn to take Jeno to task. “Don’t you like Mr Jung?”

“I do!” Jeno props up his face with both his hands, and looks directly at Donghyuck. “But he’s nothing compared to you. I like seeing what you’re up to more.”

“You’re saying that you’re skipping class to _watch me write my essay in the library?_ ”

“Well, you agreed to help me with my bucket list. So help me with it!”

“As your best friend, I’m obligated to tell you that you need to have a better reason to skip class.” Donghyuck closes his laptop and slides it into his haversack. “Luckily for you, you have me. I’ll take you somewhere.”

It’s hard to flout rules on the regular when you are best friends with the student council president; Donghyuck doesn’t skip often, just once in a while when he feels like school is a devil pressing down on his chest that he can’t seem to muster the strength to shake off.

Even then, this entire thing about skipping, it comes to Donghyuck easily. For Jeno, not so much.

There’s Jeno, standing in the last walkway separating school grounds from the outside world, with his bleached hair swept up, shirt collar flapping slightly in the wind. With this also comes Donghyuck, feeling quite absurd, back plastered behind the security post, urging him to sneak past the guards at the gate.

“ _JUST LAY LOW, AND RUN_ ,” he whisper-shouts, but Jeno looks back at him with the expression of a lost puppy. He doesn’t catch it in time.

The guard stirs and leaps up from his chair. Donghyuck crouches lower, staring intensely into the ground in hopes that it would swallow him whole; Jeno just flashes his signature smile and speaks to the guard quietly, and before Donghyuck knows it, the guard is gently patting Jeno on the back and letting him go.

Jeno strides out of the compound like it’s his god-given right, Donghyuck rolls out from his tiny corner of trepidation and joins him.

They find themselves in a convenience store. It’s not a new location, but experiencing a convenience store before afternoon hits differently. For once, the aisles are quiet and the tables are empty.

“Lee Jeno, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone attempt truancy by confidently striding out of school at 11am.”

“Does this still count, then?” Jeno questions through slurps of instant ramen. “I told the guard that I had things to take care of outside of school.”

“I do not know. I never thought that this would happen again.”

“I guess I might have to try again then.”

“As if you have the balls to actually do it. You wouldn’t dare to attempt this on your own.”

“It depends.”

Jeno’s phone buzzes right then with a text notification and he takes a glance at the screen. “Sorry, gotta get this. Renjun’s asking me about prom, give me a second,” and excuses himself to furiously type a reply. Donghyuck sticks his tongue out mockingly in response.

Silence ensues, save for the quiet tapping of fingers on a screen. The seconds turn into minutes. Donghyuck finishes two whole triangle kimbaps in the duration that Jeno does this, thinking hard about _prom_ and the plans that he doesn’t have and passively-aggressively crumples up a plastic wrapper to break the quiet.

“Sorry,” Jeno apologises again as he sets his phone down, tearing his gaze away from the screen to watch Donghyuck instead. “There was a crisis.”

“Why was your vice-president asking about prom? Isn’t the new council organising it?” Donghyuck asks, and internally winces at the unintentional sharpness in his tone.

“It wasn’t about council, it was about a promposal,” Jeno points his look away, redirecting his attention to stir the remaining soup in his disposable bowl. Donghyuck watches the pepper flakes rise up and then get dragged back down to the bottom.

“Oh,” Donghyuck replies as nonchalantly as he can, because he’s really not sure why he’s being so worked up about the topic when Jeno’s not doing anything wrong at all.

“It’ll all work out,” Jeno replies, some strange look in his eye, as if it answers any of the questions in his mind.

It doesn’t. It really doesn’t.

The conversation ends there, by virtue of Donghyuck when he decidedly picks up the trash, clears it into the bin and embarks on their walk back to school. It’s oddly silent. Donghyuck’s mind is whirring again, about the possibility of Jeno arm-in-arm with Huang Renjun at prom, how nice they’d look standing next to each other and how Donghyuck hasn’t the slightest idea of who else he could go along with and how’d he probably wouldn’t even go if he had to go on his own.

But, at least Jeno would be happy. It’ll be his last school event and he deserved to enjoy it, even if it’s with his vice-president and not his childhood best friend.

_Oh come on, it’s not that deep, Donghyuck._

He’s broken out of his reverie when he feels Jeno’s hand circle around his wrist, dragging him back into the school compound.

“Are you okay?” Jeno peers carefully at him. His hand is still on Donghyuck’s wrist, and honestly, Donghyuck can’t figure out why he’s being as conscious about it as he is.

“Uh,” he begins eloquently.

“Is this about your scholarship application? Shoot, I took up a lot of your time, huh? I’m so sorry.”

Donghyuck simply nods, splutters up some bullshit excuse about the essay that he’s been working on and forcibly moves on.

Donghyuck never had to deal with the problem of insomnia. He’s a man of many talents, and one of them was his ability to fall asleep anywhere, anytime. He even had dance practice after school today, he ought to be exhausted.

He doesn’t know why he is in bed, staring up at the ceiling for the third hour in a row.

 _Liar_ , his brain supplies him, _you know the reason why_.

The image of Lee Jeno flutters between his eyelids. The thought of having him in his life and then not at all. Donghyuck throws the covers off his body and lets an indomitable reckoning befall him.

“You dyed your hair,” Jeno notes plainly the next day when Donghyuck turns up to homeroom.

“I did.”

“I don’t think it’s been this dark in a long time. You look like how you did back in elementary school,” Jeno laughs as he ruffles Donghyuck’s hair playfully. When he doesn’t respond, Jeno reflexively sobers up quickly. “Did something happen? Are you stressed?”

“I guess you could say that.”

“Why? Is this about the scholarship application? I’ve told you that you don’t have to worry about it, your grades are great and your extracurriculars are amazing. If you need more help with it, you could pay the advisory unit a visit.”

“I’ve got it under control,” Donghyuck mumbles. He doesn’t have the heart to tell him otherwise; Jeno’s not entirely wrong, there’s many different ways this application could go, but he isn’t right either.

“Sure,” Jeno casts him a disbelieving look.

Donghyuck just pulled an all-nighter applying black box dye to his head. He’s allowed to be tired.

Jeno pats his head once more. “You know that you always have me right?”

“— and seniors, this is a gentle reminder that you have to clear out your lockers by today. That is all for this morning. Have a great day ahead.” Chenle’s voice reverberates through the PA system.

Donghyuck stares at the mess inside his locker, and the mess stares back.

It’s been a hot minute since its contents had seen the light of day. Donghyuck’s a big believer of _out of sight, out of mind_. Currently, he’s losing his mind at the sight before him. There is absolutely no way that he’s going to clear it by the end of the day: a preliminary picking through yielded not one, but two identical copies of _Hamlet_ that he had to study last year, a clean extra set of dance clothes that probably weren’t very fresh anymore and a wrapped birthday present that he had stashed away and simply forgotten the existence of.

Jeno’s peers into Donghyuck’s locker. “Why does your locker look like this? I had no idea it looked like this,” he scoffs, “how did you even find anything in here?”

“I don’t,” Donghyuck groans. “I can’t.”

Jeno bends down to get closer to the carnage and retrieves a textbook. “Hey, isn’t this mine?”

“Is it?” To set the record straight, Donghyuck isn’t feigning ignorance. Whatever is in this locker, he has absolutely no memory about. “I don’t remember.”

Jeno stands back up to flip through the book better. “It is!” Jeno brandishes the first page where _Lee Jeno_ is printed neatly. “I’ve been looking for this.”

“The good news is that you can have it back now.”

It is at this exact moment that a note slips through the pages. Jeno bends over again to fish it from the floor. He scans the note, and his eyes light up, “it says: will you go to prom with me?”

Donghyuck freezes, and stares up at his friend.

Jeno bounces excitedly. “Hyuck, you just got a promposal!”

Donghyuck sees the words “WILL YOU GO TO PROM WITH ME?” emblazoned on the paper, and the world stops spinning on its axis for a moment. He feels oddly small, because he’s sitting cross-legged on the floor with his head in his locker, while Jeno’s standing up straight and towering over him. It doesn’t help that Jeno’s all _attractive_ now that he’s blonde while he’s just been dawdling around in his black hair, which he hasn’t had since he was a literal child.

_No, it can’t be._

“It’s your book though.” Donghyuck sighs, “the note was in the pages of your book, so it can’t be mine?” He regathers the picked-through mess once again, and pushes it back into his locker as quickly as possible, suppressing that rising sensation that threatens to spill over. “Hey, can you ask Chenle to give me an extension for this? I’ll get everything out soon, I promise.”

Donghyuck skips class to seek solace in the dance studio. He hadn’t intended to spend the last week in high school like this at all, in all honesty, but he’s not in the mood to carry himself in a respectable manner anymore. Not when the source of his distress was going to be right by his side for the entirety of the day.

It’s been three hours and Donghyuck is absolutely ravenous. He skipped immediately after homeroom, skipped lunch too, because thinking of his childhood best friend in a different light all of a sudden is genuinely one of the hardest experiences that he’s ever had to go through in his short experience of life as a teenager.

He’s lying on the floor, eyes closed, feeling the music reverberate through the floor, when the studio door swings open.

“Hyuck,” a voice calls, “you there?” A shadow looms over Donghyuck’s figure but immediately, he already knows whom it belongs to.

Donghyuck pries one eye open. “Jeno?”

“Starting over,” Jeno raises a plastic bag and shakes it slightly. “I snuck out, _actually snuck out this time_ , and got tteokbokki from that place you like down the road.”

The mental image of golden hair popping through the back window of the security post, playing cat and mouse with the guard is an interesting one. Now, Jeno is leaning against the doorway, the food that Donghyuck likes dangling from one arm with his hair out of place, like he’s been running his hands through them all day. He’s doing that thing where he’s trying to catch his breath, from running perhaps, but not trying to make it too conspicuous. Donghyuck notices anyway.

He did all that for Donghyuck.

The weight of the realisation comes much heavier than the bass shaking the floorboards and sinks deep into the room.

Donghyuck sits up and shuts the music off. “How did you know I was here?”

“I always find you,” Jeno snaps a pair of wooden chopsticks into two and hands them over to Donghyuck. “You seemed upset so I had to do something about it. Maybe you don’t feel like talking about it now, and that’s alright. I can wait. But I said this before, and I’ll say it again. You know that you’ll always have me, okay?”

The vignettes of their friendship flicker through his mind. They are six, and they’ve just been paired up with each other in junior taekwondo class. They are eleven, and Donghyuck has just landed himself in the principal’s office for punching the kid who kept stealing Jeno’s lunch money. They are fifteen, when Donghyuck’s parents are unwillingly whisked away on urgent business, unwittingly missing his first dance showcase. Jeno’s parents came instead, bombarding him with hugs and flowers backstage like he was their own.

They are eighteen now. Jeno has just embarked on his first solo escapade because he didn’t want Donghyuck to be sad.

“I know,” Donghyuck smiles as he picks up a rice cake between his chopsticks. “Thank you.”

It’s graduation day.

Donghyuck isn’t surprised, per se, but he is a little mad that it’s nothing like High School Musical. As far as public school budgets go, there are no graduation gowns, no spectacular showcase, no meticulously choreographed number to mark the end of an era. They do walk the stage though, to collect their graduation certificate, and there’s some sort of buffet table waiting at the end of everything. Donghyuck isn’t really looking forward to it, really, because his experiences of crashing previous graduations had proven that the food was questionable at best. Jeno reassures him that Chenle made an effort to get a better caterer this time, but Donghyuck takes this reassurance with a pinch of salt because _who can do it better than Lee Jeno_?

Jeno’s academic feud with Renjun finally comes to an end, somewhat, with both of them claiming joint-valedictorian position. Donghyuck watches the huge projection of Jeno’s face on the screen as he strides across the stage to get his award. It’s been barely a week, and it scares Donghyuck, somehow, how used to the new Jeno he is. The Jeno in the photo was a model student, council president. This Jeno is curious and unrestrained, free from his prim and proper image, wants a taste of everything that he missed out on.

Jeno’s not wearing his glasses for the ceremony, but he squints and somehow finds Donghyuck in the sea of seated students, even sending a little wave his way while Renjun speaks, an ode to youth and time. It’s extremely fitting.

Jeno always finds Donghyuck, somehow.

On the outside, he may have changed, but his heart hasn’t. It’s made of pure gold through and through.

The valedictorians wrap up their address and make their way off the stage. From the corner of his peripheral vision, Donghyuck sees a pink haired boy press a kiss onto Renjun’s cheek as he settles down into his assigned seat.

“Ah, I’m glad Renjun’s promposal went well.” Jeno shoots a wistful grin in their general direction. “He was so stressed out about asking Jaemin out that he would _not_ stop talking to me about it. I’m happy that he finally did it.”

 _Ah, so Renjun’s promposal wasn’t for Jeno?_ Donghyuck pretends that he didn’t spend an entire night steeped in some form of panic that tipped him to the point of hair dye and no sleep. As naturally as possible, he goes “oh, Na Jaemin, the hockey captain?”

“Yes, the hockey captain. I think they’re dating now, actually.”

Donghyuck’s mind is racing again, running a thousand miles per hour and he doesn’t know what to do with the direction that his thoughts are barrelling towards.

He coughs.

“So, how does it feel like, Mr Valedictorian,” Donghyuck looks up at Jeno. “Graduating, I mean.”

“Mm,” Jeno hums, “can’t really say, I’m not done with my bucket list yet.”

 _Oh right, the bucket list._ A momentary guilt passes as Donghyuck ponders how little he’s managed to contribute even after Jeno asked because he was too preoccupied with his own feelings. His eyes dart towards the clock. “The ceremony is ending in five minutes, oh my god. how are we going to finish this?”

“Oh, it’s only one thing.”

“Why didn’t you bring this up earlier?” Donghyuck tries to quash the panic rising in his voice. “What is it? Is it doable now?”

“Yeah,” Jeno grins, and his eyes crinkle into tiny crescents, like they always have. “I just gotta ask my crush out to prom.”

_Again?_

“Lee Jeno,” Donghyuck grabs him by the shoulders. He just has to do it, this once, at least. “How am I supposed to help you do this within such a short period of time? Who is it? Do we know them?”

“Calm down, it’s simple,” Jeno shifts Donghyuck’s hands off his shoulders and into his lap, “all I need is for you to say yes.”

At once, Donghyuck recognises it, recognises the look in his eye. Its name is love.

“Lee Donghyuck, will you go to prom with me?”

The days that follow unfold like this.

Donghyuck’s locker is a knocked over hourglass counting down to a new phase in life and it's progressively getting emptier and emptier.

Jeno pouts as he explains how hard he’d tried, that he and Renjun were helping each other score prom dates but one clearly went better than the other, how _he_ was the one to slip his own book into Donghyuck’s locker. Shell-shocked, he’d read Donghyuck’s hasty disappearance from his line of sight as a rejection.

All it takes to prompt Jeno to spring into action is an entire morning of classes by himself. They had spent more than half their lives together, and there was no way that Jeno was going to let it fall away like this, and so he runs, past the guard post, past the convenience store to the snack cart in a bid for salvation.

It is Donghyuck who picks up the textbook again, less cursed and more of a relic now, and he finally sees the forsaken prom note in its entirety. Reading it now made everything so much clearer — that was Jeno’s handwriting, all right, and the unfortunately placed smaller text literally spelt out that the note was addressed to Donghyuck. From Jeno.

Donghyuck has to stifle his laughter when Jeno recounts Renjun facepalming upon hearing his failure, _hey, why did you think it was a good idea to put it in your book and not his own? What do you expect him to think? Just say what you mean._

Everything makes sense now, Donghyuck running away. It all comes together nicely, the parts of the story fitting together snugly like puzzle pieces, and Jeno thinks he likes the picture that he’s managed to put together. He still stands a chance, so he sneaks the book back into the locker for Donghyuck to rediscover.

Donghyuck is glad that he did. The sand in the hourglass is slipping away, but not Jeno. Never Jeno.

Chenle sends Donghyuck a request two days before the big day, something about how _the new council is organising prom_ and that he’s _sure that we’ll do okay but Jeno hyung won’t stop worrying about it_ so _can you please PLEASE make sure that he doesn’t turn up at the location three hours early “by accident”._

Donghyuck drives them to school on the evening of prom. His car pulls into the school parking lot five minutes after the doors open. When he glances up into the rearview mirror, he’d see the bouquets that they got for each other sitting in the back seat and his date right beside him in shotgun.

Jeno’s hair is freshly bleached, his black roots completely gone. He texted him at 1am last night, _hey could you help me with my hair, noona is out of town_. Hours ago, Donghyuck had merely laughed, shooting him a text back about Jeno ruining his sleep schedule while getting out of his own bed, slipping on his sneakers to walk over to Jeno’s. Jeno replies with a smiley emoji, _just want to look pretty in our prom photos tomorrow_.

Jeno’s suit is tailored, but not new, an outfit that had become necessary as a result of all the formal dinners that the school hosted for god-knows-what and demanded the council president’s presence. Today he’s no longer the student council president, finally allowed to be blissfully ignorant of budgets and operations altogether. Today he’s here as Lee Jeno, Donghyuck’s prom date, and he’s allowed to be surprised, to take things one at a time.

And Donghyuck? Donghyuck is here to be Jeno’s prom date. He gets out of the driver’s seat to open the door for his date on the other side, and Jeno watches him stride across the lot, his eyes sparkling through the windscreen.

Jeno, true to his word, does look pretty.

The words, the gravity of the realisation knocks the air out of him, swirls around his head in a foggy rosy haze, an overwhelming impulse that forces his thoughts up through his mouth with no filter.

“Actually,” he throws the door open and he starts. There’s no going back now. “There’s something on my bucket list that I’d like to do too.”

Jeno looks up expectantly at him. “What is that?”

“I’d like to be kissed please. I’ve never been kissed in school before.”

Jeno’s eyes widen. “Not even when you went out with —”

“Jeno, are you going to do it or not.” Trust gossipy best friend Jeno to suddenly reappear with such impeccable timing. But Donghyuck loves it, loves this, nonetheless.

This is it, his taekwondo partner, his ride or die, his found family, all overlaid upon one another in the shape of Jeno, the one gazing at him now, softly and in awe, as if he had created the earth itself.

“Yes.” And maybe, just maybe, he does love him too.

**Author's Note:**

> [twt](https://twitter.com/_hwangtwt) | [cc](https://curiouscat.me/_hwangtwt)


End file.
